ATLANTA – Neurofeedback, an often-overlooked technique in the medical community involving the training of the brain to help improve its ability to regulate all bodily functions and to take care of itself, received considerable spotlight last week during a four-day seminar held at the Hilton Garden Inn.

The seminars were held by EEG Info (Los Angeles) a clinic/company owned and operated by the Othmer family. The company provides neurofeedback services to patients with mental abnormalities ranging from migraines to autism.

“We’ve got this incredible success story that the world doesn’t know about and that the medical community has ignored,” Siegfried Othmer, chief scientist of EEG Info and patriarch of the Othmer family, said during the conference. “It has been ignored because we haven’t seen the structural injury to give substance to the complaint.”

Othmer’s wife Susan also serves as a chief scientist of the company – while their son Kurt functions as CEO. The family holds these seminars across the country to shed light on the subject and to get more people open to the notion that this is a technique that can at times be successful.

Here’s how it works.

Those who come to EEG Info go through an interview process so the Othmers can get a better understanding of the patients. The patient then goes through a session in which he or she is hooked up to a neuroamplifier. Sensors from the amplifier are placed along the patient’s scalp to get a reading from the electroencephalogram (EEG). Those readings also are presented on a screen. During this time the patient plays a video game of some sort – a common example is a rocket game, in which the rocket is controlled through the patient’s brainwaves, not thoughts.

The aim is to enable conscious control of brainwave activity. If brain activity changes in the direction desired by the therapist, a positive “reward” feedback is given to the individual, and if it regresses, either a negative feedback or no feedback is given, depending on the protocol.

In the rocket game an example of reward feedback would be the rocket going faster and the screen becoming brighter. If the brainwave activity is going in the “undesired direction,” then the rocket slows down and the screen becomes darker.

Another such game involves a race car that the patient can steer, but the brainwaves actually move it forward and control speed. If there is a positive response then the car goes faster and the landscape looks pleasant, if the feedback isn’t then the landscape becomes bleak. This training actually conditions the brain to repair itself and the individual might not suffer from symptoms of a migraine, or speech impediment anymore after the sessions are complete.

“We’re not nudging the brain to what we prefer,” Siegfried Othmer said in reference to the technique. “We’re provoking it to reaction.”

“The brain is a muscle,” Susan Othmer said. “What neurofeedback does is provide a painless medication freeway so that the brain can be given what amounts to a very specific tune-up. Over the course of the treatment, we are able to help the patient back to a normal existence that is not hindered by the traumatic events they have experienced.”

Usually it takes between 20 and 30 sessions to “help” the symptoms of an abnormality. Those problems can range from addictive behaviors to migraines, autism, sleep disorders, and post-traumatic stress syndrome for veterans.

The software is designed by outside engineers – but the Othmer’s work closely with developing the standards and concepts of the games.

Neurofeedback was popularized by Joe Kamiya nearly 40 years ago when an article about the alpha brain wave experiments he had been conducting was published in a 1968 issue of Psychology Today.

Kamiya’s experiment had two parts in which a subject was asked to keep his eyes closed and when a tone sounded to say whether he thought he was in an alpha state or an idle state of mind. He was then told whether he was correct or wrong. Initially the subject developed the ability to distinguish between states and be correct a highly significant percentage of the time. In the second part of the study, subjects were asked to go into alpha when a bell rang once and not go into the state when the bell rang twice. Some subjects were able to enter the state on command – giving the technique a real sense of manipulating the brain into a desired state.

The Othmers have firsthand experience of the techniques and its success, since their son Brian went through the process as a child.

“We first heard about this technique in 1985,” Siegfried Othmer told Diagnostics & Imaging Week during a break in the seminar. “Our son suffered from epilepsy and had rage disorders of sorts. He also couldn’t relate to people. By today’s standards he would be considered bipolar.”

The family took Brian to several sessions and saw an immediate improvement in his behavior. “The results were remarkable,” he said. Brian went from a student who could barely articulate himself to a college graduate.

Within three years of his exposure to neurostimulation techniques, the family, which had backgrounds in physics and neurophysiology, began their own practice.

It should be noted that EEG Info is a different company from the company the Othmers spearheaded back in the late 1980s. Kurt functions as the CEO, while his parents have settled out of the business side of things. Brian passed away a few years ago, but the family maintains a foundation in his name.

“This company is all internal financing, but we are open to investment,” Kurt told D&IW. “The main thing is, we want to continue this work because it has such a positive impact on people’s lives.”